A nameless man with a feather-light grip on reality, a loner, a drifter, a thinker, but certainly not a doer, seeks therapy through the recordings of his highly lucid dreams. Until one fateful day he discovers a message hidden deep within his meticulous records, a secret set of instructions for life, death, and everything in between.

The Last Ditto follows the terrifying account of one man’s journey through decades of deep sleep exploration, into the farthest reaches of the subconscious… and beyond.

The Last Ditto is a thrilling fictional study of the darker side of lucid dreaming, a spellbinding voyage to a metaphysical world, placed squarely at the borders of madness and death.

Exploring the psychology of being, with the aid of a whistle-blower from the other side, Frank Maddish delves into the effects of the laws of observation, the power of received truth over the subconscious, and their major contribution to our current worldwide existential crisis.

The Last Ditto is the story of one man, who breaks rank with humanity to seek an alternative to our reality, and find a way to leave this place behind… forever.

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Chapter 1

1. FOG

I’m watching another old TV movie, a digital rip from a battered VHS collection, complete with fuzzy sound and tape warp. This kind is the best for my work, anything too well known, anything that’s been professionally re-mastered, won’t cut it. It won’t do at all, and here’s why.When I breach, a state of flux that has taken much of my life to accomplish, I am propelled into an abstract field. The very one this Earth is projected upon. For the process to be effective, source materials must be carefully selected. Television static, radio interference, visual encoding errors, broken frames in poorly dubbed movies, and all the inconsequential details that the audience is expected to ignore.Any familiarities, be they personal, cultural, or iconic, act as dead weight. Their excessive perceptual mass forms from slowly oscillating light particles, coalescing like cosmic mould, until emotional gravity takes effect. To successfully pierce the flat vision that stands before every human being on the planet, one must adjust one’s peripheral view. The momentous shift in perception can be immediate and overwhelming, for discovering for oneself the most ancient of all lies, is far more than enough for one lifetime.I might have found the method far earlier, if I’d known what I was looking for. At first I watched mistakes, peculiarities in human behaviour, poorly predicted outcomes, misprinted data, (particularly hand copied pieces), and failing personal belief systems. I’m not choosy where I find clues, nor even the purpose of each insight. It is a messy process, rather damaging for a young mind no doubt, but I’m an old hand at this now, and I can take it in my stride.Back in the day, the merest glimmer of first-hand knowledge, revealed a tapestry of errors in the world around me. Brought to life by childhood dreams, haunted by the spectres of the subconscious, lurking at the furthest reaches of human comprehension. Their trail of stolen memories, scattered like confetti in the dawning sun, left behind for those with the patience to piece together their own minds. A vast majority of our race would rather live with the responsibility, their curiosity outweighed by their instincts to survive. For many can never accept the enormity of the situation, the extreme delicacy of our unique position, and will remain as strangers to all they know, including themselves, until the day they die.Some of those strangers I’d studied as a child were supposedly my family, but none of us seemed particularly convinced at the time. Throughout that period I resigned myself to sitting out the whole miserable episode in an astral stupor. Eventually, after years of childlike duality, my consciousness riding it out in a space fifteen feet above my body, off with the faeries as it were, I realised it was time to come back. I dipped my toe in the human melting pot, not too hot, not too cold, and slowly blundered through the social niceties.It took me a while to get the hang of it all. The hackneyed conversations, the meaningless quest for entertainment, but with the aid of narcotics and a newly discovered sex drive, before long I was making friends and enemies, left, right, and centre. In order to maximise the efficiency of each social exchange, I subtly shifted my core into an approximation of a compatible personality. Just a little at a time so few would notice, yet, still convincing enough to ensure my social camouflage didn’t turn back into a pumpkin, at the stroke of midnight.It all ended one night in an empty flat over a chip shop, rented by a Sicilian girlfriend who needed to move on. Sitting at 4am in front of a mirror on a heavy dose of LSD, I witnessed a thousand faces, and every one of them had the same insane grimace. It was at that precise moment I had an awful realisation, that those few kind souls who had bothered to tell me the truth, were right after all.I had changed, or rather, I wasn’t me anymore.

Chapter 2

2. LORE

The tape is perfect, I have found at least four glitches. One of which appears on the bald, sweaty pate of a bit-part janitor, as he tips his hat to the shabby TV detective. There’s another in the wet mop shine of the chequered tiled floor, feathered with overexposure but fit for purpose. The other two are darker, hidden in the reflection of a locker room mirror, but still distinguishable enough to handle.I collect the visual fragments in my mind and draw them together in a freeze-framed sigil. Controlled chaos takes little imagination, but more effort every day. I make adjustments to my psyche, instinctively compensating for the numerous flaws and tears in my perceptual field, all scars from past experiments, my pioneering flights of fancy, and many with near disastrous consequences. As I manipulate the space around me and drag time to a stop, I stare into the mid-distance, and pull the plasma from the screen, to cloud the light before me like a microscopic storm.I rarely make it further on from here, and when I do I lose the memory, none the wiser to my achievements or failures. The only proof that I have even left the room and travelled to another place, is missing time, and a nagging feeling that I had something important to say. But no matter what I have won or lost, what sights I have seen or worlds I’ve encountered, everything extraneous to this particular reality, quickly fades into the background.I’ve always enjoyed exploring, it beats being explored anyway. I’ve travelled far and wide, without ever leaving my room, but the process can be messy, and I have frequently been followed home. I couldn’t sleep for the commotion in those early days, psychic distortions spilling through the walls and under the door. Then after a while it all simply stopped, and I was left to my own devices. I hadn’t even noticed at first, I was that grateful for the peace and quiet. But as I grew older and made friends, and discovered a life of some description, they found me again, the holes and slices.Eventually I broke free from my new improved persona, and strayed off the party circuit to stroll through loneliness, night after night in night bus country. I’d trip alone and watch all my faces in the mirror, all those I had known or been, or might become, and knew I had a lot of company to keep.As soon as I had discovered lucidity, I never fully slept again. My dreams are filled with creeps, and lazy ones at that. All utterly dismayed at my complete lack of cooperation, and angered by my lack of admiration for their fly-by-night reality. Much of what’s out there in the immediate metaphysical neighbourhood, is the poorest of the poor, a discarnate plane, filled with frantic desperation and a bloodlust for life.The non-existent existentialists live behind the mirrors, and sup on daydreams like tea. But at night they frenzy in an orgy of THC, and minds like mine are a favourite aperitif for the connoisseur. They love to surf Gamma Waves, peppered with a dash of Epsilon and Theta, it’s like cocaine and meth on steroids to them. If you’re aware of the parallelism, and can stand your ground in astral perplexity, then sooner or later, you’ll find yourself the toast of their painted red town. But that soon wears thin, especially when you begin to realise how ugly they are inside.
In fact it’s worse than that, they’re ugly inside out and outside in, with nothing in between. They live for life and exude death like bad indigestion, and their appetite is insatiable. After a while, you too, will meet your nemeses, a legion of experts, soft killers whose thoughts and unspoken words are so sweet, that some mistake them as saviours.The best way to avoid the majority of creepers and shadows, is not to feed them ammunition. They’re big on facial recognition, the more friends you have, the less chance you can truly control your dreams. Some see it as a lesson in the generosity of spirit, I see it as an all out war on the subconscious senses.This time around I’m avoiding crowds, I have one human, and three feline relationships. I’m keeping all social contact to a bare minimum, at least for the foreseeable future. It seems it’s the only way I can maintain some form of status quo. When I say that, I mean a regular irregularity, a dynamic flux of false variation, an arc of illusory potentiality that can handle the fractal structure of the edge of this reality, and beyond.I’ve come to learn that if you want something, you have to get out there and meet people, but the people I need to meet aren’t here, they’re down the wormhole that churns within the core of mind and spirit. It’s the same old tell-tale told time and again, but in the first person, and without the hand-me-down baubles of self-realisation. Advice is subjective at the best of times, no human can truly say they’ve looked back until the fat lady sings, and by then no one is listening. Well, that is, except for me, I listen, and I listen hard.It all needs to be this shape, a beautifully random pattern of absurdist behaviour, or I couldn’t fit through the cracks, the holes, the gaps in the academic propaganda of a once benevolent hive mind. A herd of military animals that insist on rounding up the stragglers, for yet another staged alignment. The lords and masters of a destiny I have no part in, have no interest in the likes of me and my kind.We are hardcore, an aggregate of people, laid down like gravel. It’s all over and the worse thing is we already know it, although, most of us are far beyond the point of caring. The waking day is a weaponized public relations campaign, popularizing gullibility as it feeds us to the grinder. That love, hate, life, death, money, power, spirit grinder.We’ve all paid our taxes, we’re all owed a rebate, I’m just going over their heads, maybe not to the top, but high enough to make a stink. I’m done with playing human, this hamster wheel of life and death is a systematic slaughterhouse for higher consciousness. Every history’s like the last, every journey the same as it’s ever been. Only conjured fiction and empty lies feel as fresh as a new dawn, for an undiscovered hinterland of blind hope.

Chapter 3

3. FLUX

I’m not what you’d call a gadget man, I only use technology when I need to. Although I’m still prone to drowning in the frequency soup of modern life, I try not to let it infect me. Wherever possible, I avoid the temptation to play repeater to the corrupt transmissions of an artificial hegemony.This is not my kingdom and my glory, my borders are far beyond the control net. Though they may be just as dangerous, they’re not so thick with dogma. In life I have the distinct sensation that I’m merely going through the motions, having spent a good chunk of my childhood struggling to be human. I’m self taught mind you, no help there, except for the odd chink in the armour of a blue moon stranger.It took me a while to sort the wheat from the chaff, to understand the priorities of the paradigm, our primordial society, and this atavistic world at large. I took so long to realise that my tutors were attempting to teach me, I missed out on all the parrot fashioned fun. Perhaps it was their delivery, the monotone ambiguity, the rigid reflexes of an institution in decline, or simply dumb luck.
The secret that teachers, parents, and every other adult holds back, though not so much since the technological liberation of a panoply of karma, is the terrible truth that things really are this awful. It’s not the best way to enlighten young minds, but of course, if you have a monopoly to maintain, proliferating desensitisation is never a noble cause, just a necessary one.I’ve stared out of more windows than I care to remember. One that I do recall, revealed the freedom of the iron gates, beyond the nightmares of the playground, the killing fields of hope and childish wonder. In class I learned to appear concerned at my own failure to comprehend, and regularly held that expression in repose. With that one talent, I was free to dream and drift away on the meter of the bell, ignoring any risk of ridicule, should a teacher call upon my full and immediate attention.Riding the autonomic canter of my tutelage, I’d occasionally pluck out a dulcet turn of phrase, and run rings around it in my mind. I’d spend years avoiding the gaze of teachers, frowning at the most obvious of concepts, and faking admiration for their pets.I was no more adept at physical education than academic. A gangly pile of skin and bones, has little defence against the rain and sleet. I was told the exercise would do me good, even if the overweight PE teachers in tracksuits chain-smoked roll-ups, and snapped wet towels at bare arses in the showers. All that cross-country running taught me, was to use less effort wherever possible, and bow out at the very first opportunity.Slow days stretched into years, half-asleep and hypnotised by proscribed monologues, anonymously passed through the lips of governmentally approved mouthpieces. No matter how exhausting I found the learned incarceration, I could always rely on the rabble of other sugar rushed, and glassy eyed pupils, to make things worse. Staring at those future bankers, sales executives, care assistants, and shelf stackers screaming and fighting, was as stifling as classroom etiquette.By the time I’d left school, with little to show for it, except for a few embroidered truths and unreliable facts, I learned to hide my lack of sanity, and to some degree, feigned conformity. Then again, my recollections may be little more than the fantasies of a child’s imagination. My past and present collude with each other, to camouflage my disappointment, and my uninspiring prospects for the future. All of which does little more, than dimly highlight the truly ravenous effects of prediction, and the highly addictive synaesthesia of temporal flux.

Chapter4

4. PAL SYSTEM

Most of us are under the delusion that we’re here by chance, fate, or divine intervention. Even science struggles for a theory, a freak simian mutation must be the lamest excuse ever, but it’s understandable considering the context. It can be difficult stepping back from a situation, when everyone around you is busy aping a lower life form. Rage is all the rage, it’s been that way for a long time, or at least as far as society is permitted to recall.The disturbing truth is that something was tampered with long ago, by someone with a terrible sense of humour, the whole caboodle reprogrammed, and even encrypted for purposes unknown. But that’s a different matter, altogether.I find that dreams are the best way to learn about oneself, and to some extent, recapture control of a subverted mind. One of my favourite dreams that fell to the cutting room floor, featured the kind charity of a warm and loving family, whom I’ve never met, and most likely never will. Wandering through the familiar streets of a fictional northern mining town, cobbled together from classic soaps and sitcoms, I came across an archetypal stereotype, a fat and jolly salt of the earth.He wore a ten gallon hat he’d picked up on his last vacation, and he drove a beaten up Cadillac he’d salvaged from a local scrap yard. He spoke little, but had a kind face, and a self effacing manner that put me at ease. He asked if I was down on my luck, so I told him that I was lost and looking for a job. He offered me a lift, swerved the open-top heap with a sharp right, down a cul-de-sac of a quaint cottage-style council estate.He led me to a green door, played knock down ginger, and was gone. A woman in a dressing gown with brood in tow, took me in and fed me. Then she trimmed my hair, dressed me in old but clean clothes from her late husband’s wardrobe, and set me on my way with a little change for bus fare, should one pass.I awoke abruptly, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I’d been walking in someone else’s shoes, perhaps a dead man. My memories can barely muster a friendly face at the best of times, let alone domestic bliss, and with such convincing detail. I’m more experienced at nightmares, a vast majority of which feature a frantic chase, with no beginning nor end.Dreams and nightmares share one thing in common, a lack of closure, that awful nagging feeling that the whole charade will be over, before I’ve even had a chance to learn the rules. Worse still, all that wasted effort, for a seemingly pointless exercise in transcendental futility.I’ve learned two things from my nocturnal ventures:1. I regularly get stuck in other people’s dreams. They’re never friends, nor total strangers, but homoeopathically connected through hearsay, like a diluted synchronicity.2. The speed of life is mirrored by the speed of time, which is a side-effect of the false barometer of the soul, known as the mind.I’ve only dreamt of one inhuman life, an energetic being, living in an electric blue frequency of light, peppered with plasma pools, which effervesced in a cobalt cave of fool’s gold stars. A symbolic construct for my benefit, counteracting my limited understanding of a greater reality, than I could possibly comprehend. A place outside of time and space, home to a society of all-knowing and benevolent creatures of silence and solitude. Highly learned beings, some as tall as trees, who sat peacefully, or bathed, or merely glanced and smiled in the direction of yet another wide-eyed intruder. Their voiceless conversations guiding their young, soft soothing thoughts crystallised with experience. A spectacle of sensorial splendour so beautiful, my heart sank as I struggled to form any kind of human comparison.I felt ashamed at my limitations, the gross acts of an instinctual individuality, barbed by the longing to hunt and gather information. I left there with the distinct feeling that I, and all my kind, are at best obtuse in a place like that, and at worst, the embodiment of vulgarity.As I slipped back into my body I met a fellow interloper, one of many who I assume have traded sleeping lives with me. Their engram of reassurance was a break from protocol, yet a welcome sign of interdimensional compatibility, and a potential friendship from beyond my imagination.Those familiar shadows, neither living, nor dead, that stand sentry in my first and last waking moments, seem as unsure of me as I am of them. They know that I know what’s going on, it’s more than lucidity, I’ve woken up in sleep. Two versions of myself, conscious in the subconscious, hurriedly exchanging cryptic messages in an intergalactic semaphore, confirming the truth that waking life is just another dream. That’s not something you can simply shrug off, in fact quite the reverse, I wear that memory like a crown.

Chapter 5

5. DEFLECTION

I am an interloper, a metaphysical day-walker, who hankers for a nocturnal past. I used to suffer from insomnia, I still do to some degree, but at its peak I’d spin around the clock like a roulette ball, now it’s more like bar billiards.I’ve just about got the hang of mornings, that great wall of incongruity that greets me every day. As a coping mechanism, I constantly immerse myself in sound, in the deep end of the auditory pool, to mask out all intrusion, and avoid the mental bends of dream decompression. Like a deep sea diver in a bathysphere, I sink beneath the muffled screeching gulls and screaming kids, past the barking backyard dogs and wailing cats on heat. Far below the heavy drone of black helicopters, and the whining queues of chemtrail jets that criss-cross my coastal sky.A view that used to be far more blue, has turned as white as a sheet, even silver, when the sun breaks through the tramlines of barium and aluminium chaff. Whether the weather has been modified to save the world, or kill it, seems pretty academic now, watching the seasons blur into each other, as the sky transforms into a giant TV screen.Once evening falls, the stars hang too low for my liking. Some of them glint so strangely, I can even make out double and triple lights of neon primary colours. Then there are the black triangles, the floating orbs, and tiny shooting stars. The night sky’s far too busy to bother with anymore, it doesn’t make sense to me these days. The wandering seasons and planetary bodies, even the sun doesn’t know its arse from its elbow, and when it does decide to pop up from some random direction, it flickers like a shitty fluorescent tube.I’m getting tired of surprises, there are so many glitches I can barely bring myself to glance upwards. The last time I took a peek, I saw the sun rise and set within an hour, it’s almost getting embarrassing how fake the world’s become. The lies have left me feeling numb, and If my thoughts have ever been controlled by a shadow government, I’m sure they’d have lost interest by now, I know I have. What really gets to me is a tediously repetitive sense of déjà vu, somewhat sprinkled with disappointment. Whoever cooked up this world needs to find another job.When we sleep, our brains are submerged below a tide of cerebrospinal fluid, that looks like the sky when it was still clean. At nightfall, the pinpricks that twinkle-twinkle, are the synapses of the human brain ticking over, dreaming of a new tomorrow. Each dawn, the brain floods with a deep blue neural brainwash, stripping universal truths from the short-term memory, leaving nothing but the subliminal instructions of a nocturnal yesterday, to play for today.

Big budget movie makers don’t bother sifting through scripts anymore, they have software to do that. Using artificial intelligence to conduct surveys and polls, they analyse forecasted profits, global reach, and potential merchandising deals. Unfortunately, the majority of movie lovers have no imagination, and simply ask for what they know. The tried and tested formulas that used to put bums on seats, are now little more than fodder for mass ridicule.

Connectivity has utterly banished the element of surprise, and the audience’s attention span has reached such critical proportions, Hollywood’s major production houses have resorted to perpetuating urban myths. Much like the recent spate of axe-wielding clowns, that has proven a far cheaper and more effective alternative to expensive teaser campaigns. Even if it does cause panic amongst the nation, viral is viral, no matter how you look at it.

The silver screen is tarnished and torn, and only the most devout acolytes of meaningless drivel and sensationalist plots, still appreciate the efforts of those behind the scenes. The bulk of the majority has seen it all before, sequel after sequel, remake after remake, each deploying the same subtext, heavily skewed by a microscopic echo chamber of political consensus.

Hollywood is in its death throes, but even with its final breath, it shouts louder than ever before. The ravings of a suicidal maniac whose lost all hold on power, unseated from its throne by a silent revolution of cynical consumerism. Which might be why the cinematic concept, paying for the privilege of watching someone else’s TV, seems positively antiquated in the present day.

Hollywood used to manufacture idols, created for worship and adoration, but nowadays people prefer to make them suffer for their entirely misplaced good fortune. The poor little rich kids and their extended family of nepotists, have made some desperate moves into politics, pressing all the hot button issues to ramp up the takings. But as they monotonously repeat their scripts, spearheading tactics for moral outrage under the repressive regime of their beloved new social order, the shining lights of the phony cultural revolution are called out for their hypocrisy.

They’re very fragile creatures, the slaves at the dream factory, the broken people who made it to the top, only to see the bottom fall out of the market. But it won’t be long now before they’re usurped by new advances in technology, and the millions of potential actors and directors subsisting on the internet, all of whom are more than willing to do it for free.

The smallest screen, the one that people carry in their hands, has swallowed up the world. The more reality shrinks from view, the less the distorted reflections of Hollywood have to offer. Their consolidated vision has been blinkered on all sides by blind greed and panic. Flooding the world with new faces, attention seekers who dream of stardom and live in luxury, lecturing the oppressed to appreciate their bondage into consumer slavery has left them isolated and alone.

Hollywood’s elite can sense their own extinction, and no matter how much money they throw at the problem, in truth, they know it’s time to roll the credits. They’re painfully aware that this life, this world, this phony stage upon which we all take our turn and play our parts, is far from glamorous. The difference is that now the audience is the director of their fate, and our humdrum lives, filled with such fetid disappointment, abused from birth to death by Hollywood’s psychotic agenda, has turned their dreams to shit.

There are those who want to get high, and those who want to go low. One generation, above all others, ideologically sandwiched between its polar opposites, has taken up the mantle of emotional martyrdom. For many of their number, caught up in the tangled web of interconnectivity, there’s no choice. Acknowledging their awareness of cultural prescience is as important to them, if not more so, than true personal experience. Those amongst their peers fortunate enough to be born into comparative privilege, are expected to beg for forgiveness, whilst those who are not, are seen fit to administer their own particular brand of justice at will.

A plague is coming, a plague of doubt, a highly infectious depression so many secretly hold at bay. When those far younger than me, who believe it is their time to alter the course of history, are finally beaten down by the immoveable establishment, they’ll take it far more personally than I, because they were raised to expect more from humanity.

I’ve suffered suicidal depression over the years, and I’ve been dragged back from the brink of death on several occasions. The thing is, to survive here, I’ve had to abandon guilt. If I’m wrong and understand the reasons why, I’ll freely admit it, apologise and try to make amends. But my colour, my gender, my sexual preference, my time served on this planet, these things I can do nothing about, they are merely the irrevocable facts of my life. The hatred I see around me, the oversimplification of cultural conflict, the ad-hoc solutions, the blind excuses, and endless social bandwagons, it’s just not good enough, and I’m telling you now, the ending to our story isn’t going to be pretty.

Whilst I’m here, I’d like to ask, whatever happened to individuality? It’s seriously lost favour with the masses, those people who like to come together in their thousands, or sometimes millions, at the merest mention of a new rebellion. What are people fighting for, if not for themselves? Moving forward shouldn’t entail erasing the past, merely for the sake of kudos amongst one’s contemporaries. Progress cannot be enforced, or bound by the reassurances of political echo chambers. Progress should mean conceptualising a state of humanity unhindered by the traditional dualistic paradigm, and avoiding the if’s and buts of our predicated progression, so expertly co-opted by the propaganda of a manipulated state.

Nothing’s for free in this world, and nothing’s ever easy, however much you might think you have right on your side. Everything has a price nowadays, and life has no guarantees, security and safety can cost you dearly in the end. The situation isn’t new, the apathy of crumbling empires, their suicidal numbers, have all but been lost in a mire of anthropological conjecture. A time will come when none will remember the names of the brave, nor their followers true. The domesticated herd of the majority, will be long dead, much like their every meme, thought for the day, political promise, corporate guarantee, or sworn allegiance to the next fleeting cause that might just be coming your way.

Some people, given a little power, have a tendency to go crazy. I’m pretty sure I’m not one of them, although I doubt I’ll ever have the opportunity to test that particular theory. I’m what you might call an underachiever, an accidental rebel, the quiet kid who found himself at the back of the class, after years of being slowly shuffled further and further from the front.

I wasn’t exactly a troublemaker, I simply leaned more towards peaceful resistance than subservience. Nevertheless, I was sent to the headmaster on many occasions, and each and every time I was caned. I attended a grammar school with an identity complex, the headmaster at the time had obvious aspirations for something private and far more prestigious. As it would turn out, some years after I’d left, when corporal punishment had been outlawed, he went to town on some poor kid and was dragged away by the police.

His name was Bird, a great lanky fellow with a pompous air about him, he and his deputy insisted on always wearing their mortar boards and capes. Of course, both carried their canes wherever they went, should the opportunity for instant reprisal arise. Then again, all of the teachers at my school were screwed up, most of which merely went through the motions, staggering from classroom to classroom like zombies. Those few who still believed in their chosen vocation, who showed the slightest sensitivity to their pupils, suffered the constant backlash of jeers from the crowd.

My French teacher at the time, an overweight, red-faced alcoholic with a love of jazz and red wine, went by the nickname Links, (although I’d never bothered to ask the other kids why). Rather late in my grammar school education, he had me punished for looking at him the wrong way. That’s the exact phrase he used, at first intimating that I, a fourteen year old boy, had the hots for a middle-aged pig in white flannels. Not exactly impressed by the ridiculous insinuation, but getting rather sick of being sent to the headmaster, I decided to double-down and frown. As I glared at the bilious oaf he stuttered in protestation, holding a trembling finger in the air and ordering me out of the classroom.

Soon enough the deputy head swooped down like a vampire and dragged me by the ear to see Bird. The bastard peddled his usual hypocritical drivel, under the delusion that caning me was purely for my own good. I joined the queue, the usual nogoodniks, all smirking and nodding at each other with a subdued mutual admiration. Except for one kid named Brian Loader, almost everyone picked on him, although he never did do himself any favours. He couldn’t help the lisp, and like I, coming from a poor single parent family, his clothes didn’t fit him, his shoes were dirty, but he was just one of those kids who didn’t know when to stop.

He was small and he couldn’t particularly defend himself, but even when a rugby team grunt had him pinned to the ground, with his matted blood and hair in his clenched fists, Brian just wouldn’t back down. That’s why he was always in Bird’s office getting six of the best, at least once a week I’d say. Except for one late Friday afternoon, a week before the Christmas break, when Bird had decided he’d had enough of Brian, and with a wooden yard rule, took a long run up and smacked the kid’s rear with all his might.

It shattered to pieces, the ruler, and as shards and splinters of wood shot in the air, Brian, I, and half a dozen other kids jumped for joy. It felt like time had slowed down, Bird’s hand was bleeding everywhere, it was such a beautiful sight to see, the man who’d made so many suffer, receiving a little of the pain he’d dished out through the years.

Authoritarians should take note, nothing lasts forever, not rulers, nor careers, and most certainly not power. For be it in this world, or the next, a time will come when those who believe they are here to maintain order, may find chaos has come to consume them.

We’ve always had bad weather. The difference is that we now live in an interconnected world, with a global media fixated on milking every story for all it’s worth. No matter the truth, or consequences, they’ll tow the official line, and avoid all mention of industrial-scale cloud seeding, or high-frequency auroral injection. What’s more, they’ve suffered so many budgetary cutbacks, that much of the time you’ll find them lazily relying on their viewers. All the suckers, readily armed with mobile phones to record every moment of the supposed impending disaster.

If ten thousand people die in a flood in India or China, you might hear about it on the news, you might see a few video clips, even a reporter or two on location. What you won’t see is wall-to-wall coverage on every MSM channel, or YouTube recommendations for a dozen up-to-the-minute streams. Most of which are accompanied by a live chat that races by so quickly, you probably won’t notice that the viewers aren’t watching the weather, they’re just there to argue the toss.

When the highly popularised term Global Warming was embarrassingly debunked, and amended to the more generic climate change, you’d think more people would’ve clocked the mistake. Of course, humanity has made a mess of the world, but we’ve more than paid for it, the consumers, the taxpayers, with a lifetime of hard graft without fair reward. If on the other hand you’ve made a billion or so from selling us crap, and rained it back down on our lives everyday, give the money back, give it back now. We, the people of the earth demand a refund, cancel all debt, level the playing field, force those with the bulk of the world’s currency to spend it on cleaning up their act.

Of course, if you’re one of that select few, you won’t. Instead I’m sure you’ve made plans, and think you know a way to sit this one out. I expect you and your nest egg have a lovely place lined up, a tropical island, a mountain retreat, somewhere to watch the collapse of civilisation in comparative safety. But you’ll miss us when we’re dead, and most likely in the end, you’ll join us. When your robot slaves have broken down, and you’re shitting yourself in your panic room, because your maintenance clones have revolted and escaped on your yacht, you’ll kill yourself. It’s only human nature after all, because the rich are mere mortals like the rest of us, and are nothing without their money.

So, what about the age old argument, those who supplied it, denied it? Yes, to some degree, we humans are a filthy lot and we have made a mess of this world. Not that it would take long to repair, should we all suddenly disappear from existence. But, until every environmental evangelist has weather modification at the top of their list of pet peeves, I’m bowing out. I’m not wasting my life arguing the toss with those who’d prefer to blind themselves to what they see.

Rather than using their own eyes, their own brain, they cite something they’ve heard on the news, advocated by the academic establishment, so that we, as individuals, living day-to-day and hand-to-mouth, should suffer the guilt and remorse of our impoverished lives. We, in turn, are expected to throw our pittance in the pot, to fund the extravagances of well paid administrators of highly obscure organisations. That was the idea anyway, unfortunately for them, too many people aren’t playing the game, and now the idle rich are sick of us, our penny pinching, our seething frustrations, and they’re determined to put civilisation in its place.

If you believe the crazy storms, sunspots, and mid-winter heatwaves, are down to car pollution and plastic bottles in the sea, you’re an idiot. If you think that all that muck in the sky is just contrails, you’ve been conned. I know what a contrail is, I saw plenty of them as a child, they’re made from water and they quickly evaporate. What we have now is a sky full of aluminium flakes and barium. It deflects light and heat, and hothouses the world, dispersing toxic rain to cause major respiratory disease, amongst many other medical complaints.

It’s too late now, there’s nothing we can do, we’ve already handed over our individual sovereignty for the sake of co-dependency. We are all equally guilty of complicity, we helped build this god-awful corporate age. Which in itself, is just one of a succession of feudal states, designed to covertly reign over us without too much complaint. Democracy is a smokescreen, and our Pharisees, our so-called democratically appointed representatives, kowtow to their unelected masters, to administer unjust laws upon those who dare to disagree.

So why, you might ask, would anyone want to deliberately ruin the world?

I’ll tell you. There’s no point having all the money, power, and influence you could possibly imagine, if your subjugated masses don’t do as their told. Which is why governments of the world, protecting the vested interests of the corporatocracy, have inch-by-inch, legal amendment by legal amendment, slowly eroded our inalienable human rights. Until now, those amongst us who disagree with the subjugated majority, are policed and punished by both state and society.

Eventually, after a few more years of bad weather, they’ll start switching off the power, and then they’ll shutdown the Net, and leave us to tear each other apart for a while. Maybe for a month, a year, a decade, who knows?

Then comes the reboot, Humanity 2.0. The consumer age being long dead and gone, replaced by a far smaller and more manageable society, will proffer the decree that open slavery increases productivity. The value of life forever held against a false barometer of limited resources, our descendants being mere products of an almighty corporate entity. Only the most subjugated will be offered the illusory enticements of advancement, offering slim rewards for the most compliant and complicit members of the highly controlled population.

A time of renewal, I’m sure that’s what they’ll say to calm the natives, a new and improved subspecies formerly known as mankind. A future populous of domesticated beasts, artificially bred to feel more contented in their slavery, to work efficiently and consume less food and energy, and to never again complain about the weather.

I saw a photograph of a piece of inane graffiti art recently, a stencil work on a highway. It read SMILE. There’s a major difference between encouragement and coercion, no matter how slick the presentation. Being forced to express positivity, even for the sake of art, always sends a cold shiver down my spine.

People seem to need more visual cues every day, what to say, what to wear, where to go and why. It’s a rare sight to see someone follow a hunch, to think off the top of their head, without fact checking their every move, just in case the world thinks differently.

I was planning to write a post on the power of the lie, but it seems I’m in sync with several newspaper journalists at the moment, which is something of a worrying development. I wanted to share a theory I’d come up with, in fact I will anyway, who cares what the papers say.

I get it, research shows that the better the education, the better the liar. But to be honest, the art of lying is a fundamental tenet of a successful society. There hasn’t been a single culture in history worth noting, that hasn’t at the very least dabbled in a little exaggeration.

To be a success one must become a liar.

Great artists fool the eye. Musicians may play with the truth, but sooner or later, if they’re offered the deal of a lifetime, they’re sold on a lie. If authors weren’t writers they’d be some of the most successful con-artists in the world today, asides the politicians, who are the masters of deception, peddling lies great and small to their gullible electorate. Money too, it’s nothing but a sham, printed with a broken promise to pay the bearer on demand. Society itself is merely an aggregate of falsehoods and untruths, ensuring a smooth succession of power, whilst the masses keep living a shared delusion of civilisation.

If there were no falsehoods, if people were incapable of lies, the world would soon tear itself apart, no longer protected from its ghastly self. It’s a shame, but we’re only human, and for the most part we do the best we can to work with what we’ve got. It’s seems that for far too many in the world, the truth doesn’t merely hurt, it makes the difference between life and death, survival and collapse.

So many have jumped on the bandwagon, there’s precious little left beyond the pale. Individuality is dying, as is knowledge, empathy, and anything remotely resembling higher consciousness, is slowly drowning in a sea of glamorised conformity. We, the last remaining individuals of the world, must pretend to play the game. We are forced to speak and behave as those around us, yet we alone have been granted witness to the true deceit of society and its inbuilt redundancies. As for those who say otherwise, those who proclaim to be fighting for the truth in the name of freedom, they are at best martyrs of conjecture, and at worst, the greatest liars of all time.

If reality is a holographic construct, then perception is everything. As the human race loses itself in a real-time digital mirror, one by one trading their individuality for social currency, those left on the sidelines are vilified, ostracised, and ridiculed by the majority. Collectivism is the new fascism, devaluing emotion through oversensitivity, propagating a narrative so narrow and constrained, human instincts must defer to the social protocols of the ill-informed and gullible.

Each of us will leave this place alone, our former ties and allegiances broken by our inevitable demise. Political factions, peer group pressures, familial responsibilities, questions of identity and purpose, engendered ideologies and philosophies, all fall away at the point of death. What remains, at least for those who truly understand that their consciousness is not bound by the sum of their experience, and the limited paradigm of our physical existence, will have time to reflect, a brief respite between one subjugated role and the next. The rest will languish in the abstract, awaiting new commands, each subsequent life offering simpler codes of behaviour and concepts of individuality than the last.

The new world order is as old as the hills, and has always relied heavily upon the complicity of the masses. No matter how many occupy this world, few are afforded the opportunity to supersede general opinion. Instead they are encouraged to contribute to the whole, to push forward the narrative for greater compliance, and as history shows, will almost always suffer the consequences. Humans are inevitably guided by the subject rather than the process, misunderstanding the dialectic of duality, and are invariably more than willing to choose sides in a pointless argument.

Belief systems, be they religious, political, sociological or otherwise, take precedent over insight, forethought, and any form of holistic understanding of the human condition. Education has much to answer for, discouraging enquiring minds from reading between the lines, barely engaging with each generation’s audience, tasked solely with creating new workers who can take orders.

Beauty is used as a weapon, a social defence mechanism to propagate conformity, exploiting the power of vanity to dissuade the masses from reclaiming their sense of individual identity. The most beautiful of all are considered the most perfect, those who have the ultimate proportional relationship of features. The mathematical viability of beauty relies on the golden ratio, the proportions and length of the nose, the position of the eyes, and the length of the chin.

Those who do not conform to the standard do their best to improve or disguise their assumed physical imperfections. Through cosmetics or even cosmetic surgery, fashion, hairstyle, or even digitally altering selfies for Instagram, in one way or another people try their best to cover up nature’s mistakes.

Hollywood, the media, advertising, the music industry, the fashion world, all do their damnedest to keep the lie going. It’s a well known fact that sex sells, but beyond that, perfection is the ideal that keeps the money flowing. Which is why, beneath the surface, asides the minor tweaks and improvements in technology, design is for the most part an afterthought, a way of reviving old and outdated expectations.

People who say they want change, an ideology so many politicians in the past have exploited, rarely ever stop to question what exactly they want changed and how? We’ve been duped, history was never as old fashioned as the documentaries would have us believe, and the future is filled with modernity and scientific splendour. We are what we are, imperfectly perfect in our vision, and forever one with the natural order. Artifice and synthesis never last, not in the great scheme of things. We can strive all we like, chase the dream and grab it with both hands, but the world’s an ugly place, and it’s high time we got used to it.

Let’s get this clear from the outset, no one can claim legal authority over another without their consent. With that in mind, it seems strange that merely by the involuntary act of birth, we are expected to accept the legitimacy of those who hold dominion over us.

Democracy is a collective decision, the will of the people coming together to build upon the noble aims of a fairer society. Yet despite the good intentions, authoritarians, plutocrats, technocrats, and those of superior rank and royal bloodline, still rule the world. The playing field isn’t level, it’s an insurmountable peak, for the game is fixed, both sides are cheats, and the true results remain hidden from the public gaze.

Any political party that promises to represent its citizens, is lying through its teeth. We’re nothing, you, I, and another six or so billion others on this planet. Any form of resistance provides little more than conundrums, intriguing problems for the experts to figure out in the years to come. Kill empathy, emotion, any true sense of identity, the concept of family, friendship beyond mere social expectation, love, hate, life itself. That’s what’s coming over the horizon, and to be brutally honest, we, the shepherd’s flock, the grovelling penny pinching masses, who daren’t peek our heads above the parapet, deserve everything that’s coming to us.

The price of freedom is far too high to give up on all this crap, the internet, smart devices, music, movies, celebrity gossip. Culinary delights from around the world, vacations to far off climes, sharing photos and handy tips, the illusion of friendship, and the instant gratification of synthetic sexuality. For many freedom is a misnomer, exchanging everything for liberty offers little comfort for the brave. The law of the jungle, the brutal conquering the weak, the loneliness and the boredom of a lifetime of subsistence, spent scraping away at the soil for a bite to eat.

There’s no point in choosing sides, everyone in power is connected, if not through bloodline, then through shared vision. The rest are fools, duped by the promise that anybody can make it to the top. Of course, the greedy are cheap, they’d rather sell their souls to sit on the top of a heap of shit, than keep shovelling. The remainder are perhaps the most gullible in all history. We, who still have hope that by some miraculous turn of luck, humanity will shine through and win in the end. It won’t, and it never has. Every example of collective responsibility has produced a figurehead, and a corrupted one at that. Namely those with enough guile and cunning, the greatest liars of all-time, who’ve cast themselves heroes and heroines of history, fighting for a better life for all.

When are we going to snap out of it? I’m sure long after I’m dead, if ever. It’s such a shame, I knew all this as a child. My mother, neighbours, teachers, all would accuse me of having a problem with authority. I do, with all my heart, I’d rather die senselessly in a world of absolute true freedom, unshackled by the self proclaimed interests of crony capitalists and corrupt dictators, than be martyred for their fashionable cause.

As far as I, or any of my generation are concerned, we’ve lived our lives long enough to know if the shit hits the fan, we’ve had our turn. Some people wish they could be young again, I’m not one of them, if anything, I pity future generations. Things are going from bad to worse, and all they’ll have to inherit are our mistakes. The worst of all being our willing subjugation to the tyrannical indiscretions of a brutal social order.

As long as those who enforce the rules of conduct, administer laws and cultural traditions, we’re destined to obey the illusionary power of authority. No matter how much the individual resists, eventually their compatriots will betray them for the chance to survive the devastation of humanity. With much of the population decimated through various means, infertility, martial law, tainted food and water, only the loyalist slaves will remain.

Yet even they’ll be punished for their collusion, destined to live as mindless drones, chemically altered and psychologically programmed to be happy with their lot. Shift workers afforded brief rest in coffin-sized cubicles, working to zero hour contracts in unfit conditions. Dedicatedly following the orders of an artificial intelligence, that much like its creators, is slowly learning to despise the human race.

The problem is that too many of us fear the alternative, a perpetual state of anarchy. Humanity lacks faith in itself, and dreads its inevitable descent into madness should the hierarchy collapse. It’s human instinct after all, or rather reptilian, the survival programming of the lower brain. The myth of authority is a ruse, a ferocious beast dressed in the fineries of wealth, cloaked under a guise of respectability. Our race persists with its primitive rage, both master and servant live by the same fundamental rites. The law of the jungle is alive and well, the strong wield power over the weak, and those who control our natural resources, will continue to hold sway over all others.

It’s becoming a very lonely world out there. Few even consider love nowadays, and as far as sex goes, whole generations have become flashers. They used to be dirty old men in the park, dressed in nothing but their socks and shoes, and a loose fitting mackintosh. Now it seems that everyone’s at it, or at least those most proud of their natural assets. Then again, those not so confident might splash out on a few enhancements, a bigger chest, a longer wang, liposuction, Botox, new hair, new teeth. You name it, there’s someone out there willing to carve you up for the right price.

Then there’s the problem of unrealistic expectations. If you’ve seen enough adult content, you’ll start to wonder if every man out there has a foot long snake in his pocket. The same goes for women, men expecting fresh faced good time girls, as thin as a rake, with humongous breasts and a tidy foo foo. All scrolling through potential dates on their phones, picking out sexual mates like they’re online shopping, and no one ever able to return the goods if they’re dissatisfied with the service.

It reminds me of a scene from a corny old sci-fi movie, one of my all-time favourites, Logan’s Run. Although, I admire it more for its nostalgia-infused camp value, than any profound dystopian message. Obviously, Logan’s Run got a lot wrong, an entire population dressed in jumpsuits, facing compulsory death at 30, all busy frolicking around in a shopping mall without a care in the world. But as far as Grindr, Tindr, or any of the other ubiquitous apps out there go, the movie predicts the phenomenon to a tee. Michael York dials up Jenny Agutter, but she’s not in the mood for fun. No worries, before long his best pal turns up with two more hotties, so they get high on a purple smoke bomb and start fooling around.

Then there are the robots, sci-fi hasn’t really dealt with the subject very well, at least not in terms of sexual relations. Instead of lying back and thinking of England, or Japan, or wherever they were manufactured, they think of nothing, because they haven’t got a brain. Much like the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, but with less straw and wearing suspenders. I’m sure there are male robots too, but you won’t hear the media jawing on about synthetic gigolos. Why, you may ask? It’s obvious, women have been finishing themselves off with all sorts of devices for decades. But now technology is advancing, and men have graduated from rubber dolls, and found something better to massage their ego, amongst other things.

It’s all the rage in Asia, robosexuality is here to stay, that is if you can believe the hype. Look up the male virginity rates in Japan, so many men playing with dolls, so many women who can’t see the point of relationships. I guess this might come across as a little insensitive, but has anyone ever considered the connection between a lack of physical contact, and the escalating suicide rate? Just saying…

I think it might’ve been Futurama that first came up with the term robosexual, I’d fact check but what the hell. Imagine a future where millions publicly profess their love for cold, unemotional, highly attractive automatons. Sounds a bit like Hollywood to me, glossy propaganda reducing love and romance to a simple formula. Looks plus money plus sexual athleticism equals a happy ending.

I guess in the future there might even be robot-pimps, hiring out mechanical pros to turn tricks for soft-bodied saps. Who knows, when people get desperate enough, they’re just about willing to do anything to get their rocks off. You can see what’s coming, can’t you? Finally, with enough advancements in AI and robot rights, our faithful sex machines will spurn the human race and do the nasty without us. Leaving us on the sidelines, a pitiful race of voyeurs, lost in a world of auto-eroticism, wondering where the hell it all went wrong.

Have you ever heard of shrinkflation? It’s a neat little trick that food manufacturers, especially confectionery brands, use to manage our expectations in this permanent state of austerity. Instead of paying higher prices, we get less bang for our buck. Just to put this in context, there’s not been widespread food rationing since WW2. It’s an economy of truth, a cheap trick to keep the masses in check. The worst thing about it is that we, the consumers, prop up our corporate paymasters, who in turn sway the political agenda, ensuring that everyone plays along with the ruse. So much capitulation for a measly sugar rush, it’s rather sad really.

The thing to remember, is that with an ever growing population there should be more money in circulation, not less. Ever since the crash of 2008, governments around the world have been printing money to offset their enormous debts. Yet, for all their frantic activity, most of us find we’re earning less, and barely able to make ends meet. It’s not as if consumers can go on strike. We’d only starve ourselves to death, achieving little more than a spike in insurance premiums, and a short-lived boom in the funeral sector.

There’s only so many things a trillionaire can buy, until all that’s left for sale are people. We, the population of the Earth, have been bought and sold a thousand times over, and yet so few of us realise our material worth decreases by the day. So what’s the point of maintaining the status quo? We only have ourselves to blame, we voted for this, or we didn’t, but nevertheless we still play the game. We accept the notions of law and order, embrace the economic truth, and speak the language of our tormentors with our every utterance. We are caught in a trap of our own making, and it’s been this way for so long now, we’ve become accustomed to the impotence of democracy.

We’ve traded in our freedoms, our inalienable human rights, for a temporary stay in a third rate Elysium. No one here is free, not unless you have the money, not unless you can afford to ignore the rules and pay the fines. Even then you won’t need to, if you have true wealth and power, you’ll most likely help write the rules, new laws for every land.

Inevitably there’ll come a crisis point, a day of global unrest, a worldwide riot. A time when the walls come tumbling down, and the lunatics take over the asylum. Then every person of influence, the leaders of our pitiful race, will scuttle off to their luxury burrows, hoping to avoid drowning in the human soup of hunger and pain. When the pyramid of power is toppled, and the hierarchy is no more, there’ll be no sanctuary, no escape, only comfortable prisons for the rich, and mass graves for the poor.

I was born here for the sake of love. I and my wife had arranged to meet in Britain during our last stint in the hereafter. I arrived first, followed some two years later by my friend and lover of many lifetimes. Our lives encircled each other, inexorably drawn together to share the journey, as we have done so many times before.

I have the nagging feeling I wasn’t as keen on Britain as my wife. She, far more than I, errs on the side of caution when it comes to manifest destiny. During our preparations, perhaps over a year, a decade, a century, time seems inconsequential when you’re dead, we assumed that Britain would be a safe bet.

Now we’ve lived a good proportion of our lives, we’ve slowed down and become settled in our ways. We like to watch old movies, the tat you’ll find floating about on Youtube, the kind of quaint drivel that overpowers the melancholic with nostalgia. We barely follow the plot, and hardly take notice of the dialogue. Instead we inspect the architecture, the lush and verdant natural landscapes, the lack of cars on the road. The time taken over everything, basic common decency, a true sense of community, the innocent pleasures of our youth. Then we cry, although only a little, just a few tears at most. For we miss our childhood history, and the world so many have forgotten.

Today there’s no peace, no quiet, only vacuous conversation and neutered opinion. There’s music blasting from every window, and at least a few arguments a week, drunks in the street and domestic squabbles, kids screaming for new tablets and consoles. There’s little time to relax, but when there is, and the sun is out, and everyone can’t help but smile, chemtrails fill the sky, and it rains for days at a time. Tainted showers of subversive biochemistry, grey and metallic, inducing viruses of various sorts; common colds, migraines, and sometimes with the aid of frequency manipulation, psychological control.

It’s a shame I was so young when I was born, I never really did appreciate the glories of an empty world. The ancient trees, long walks on unmade paths, never a soul to be seen for mile upon mile. A time, and not so long ago, when one could choose to live life on a human scale, independent, individual, schooled in the commonsense of everyday practicality. They’re all dead now, the people who took the long view and saw everything through to the bitter end. Soon it will be my turn, perhaps in a decade or two, along with my whole generation. All mouth and no trousers, desperate to make our mark, but too terrified by life to make a difference.

As the generations pass and the human race thinks more, and does less, a time will come when all ideas of past and future will fall by the wayside. A blinkered masterpiece of social cohesion, sold from birth and reinforced by state education, the most successful example of mass indoctrination in all history. The time will always be now, and the ever increasing population, and powers of corporate cartels will result in a cowardly new world. A race who wouldn’t dream of saying boo to a goose.

The cowardly new world order will abolish economics, private enterprise, personal wealth and property. Everything rented on a lifetime leasehold, including yourself. Taking shifts to sleep in plastic pods, offering free entertainment, friendly propaganda, and high protein food substitutes, guaranteed to shorten life expectancy. All working together, or against each other, depending upon one’s gullibility. Fighting tooth and nail to earn more social credit for the basic requirements of life.

The human race of slaves will be paid with tokens, rather like now, but they’ll be born into personal debt. They’re existence taken as contractual obligation, to help settle the fictitious debts of their mother nations. When this comes, most of us, at least the troublemakers will be long gone. The rest of you who are destined to create the future’s future, you’ll have it hardest of all. Most of you aren’t even born yet, and when you are you won’t know you have been. The ultimate state of normality awaits you, impotent, imperfect servants to a technocratic elite. They’ll seem like giants, perhaps even gods, as life extension techniques pave the way to the greatest divide of all.

In the future they’ll be two kinds of people, those who live centuries at a time, and those who’ve hardly lived at all. Like the life cycle of the mayfly, human beings reduced to little more than insects, a highly domesticated childlike race of idiot savants, who’ll serve their purpose, briefly take flight, dance in the light, and die.